I think conversations between two bus drivers on a bus are the very best conversations in the world to overhear.

I'm now getting clothes that my niece has outgrown instead of the other way around. She's twelve, and starting to get into Star Trek TNG after having finished TOS. Anyway, the kid is very nearly as tall as me and that's somehow surprising without being surprising at all, because I do know I'm short.

On the job front, I have given up doing my job because of physical incapacity, and I'm very glad I spent all that time earnestly reading people's Writings upon Disability because that took the edge off some of the feelings that caused. I have also given up applying for less physically demanding jobs because apparently ten years of turning up to the same job and being good at it isn't a useful thing to put on a CV. Instead I've enrolled in a free three-month full-time course in computers, starting next month. Wish me luck because I'm not sure I'm capable of the classroom thing.

My car has died. I'm very sad. It's still drivable but structurally unsound; it's very tempting to sneakily drive it one last time and hope nobody sees. But I can get to university on the bus, so it's not a situation that desperately needs rectifying.

I'm massively into writing Thunderbirds drawerfic and playing Sims 2, partly out of feeling dread that very soon I'll be studying and won't have time for hobbies. I'm also lifting weights a bit and finding that I actually have more visible muscles than I did as well as being able to lift heavier things, which is tremendously motivating.

For future reference: I bought blackcurrant-flavoured cordial because I like the colour and then I drank a bit of it and realised that what I really wanted was lemon or lime. This is not the first time this has happened. Now I have a whole bottle of blackcurrant to use up before I can replace it, and it's not as fun to drink as good old lemon barley water and is much riskier to spill.

Cause of this pattern of foolishness: I want to try everything. I don't like buying the same thing twice in a row, it feels like I could be missing out on discovering something I like even better. I am attracted to bright colours, and have a poor memory.

Conclusion: I need to work hard on remembering my actual preferences when trying to make a decision. Possibly about more things than just flavours of cordial.

UGH, Firefox has changed and everything is in a different place and all my extensions are gone again. Apparently they are using a completely new system for extensions which means they will no longer break every six weeks and won't have to be updated constantly! Which is good! But my gif stopper has gone, not updated to the new architecture, and that has made whole websites impossible to use.

It was such a good gif stopper, it loaded gifs by default but I could freeze them instantly with a hotkey I chose myself. So I could go and look at pages of funny cat gifs without having to right-click on anything or disable the extension, but if someone had an animated icon blinking next to the text I was trying to read I could make it stop just like that. Or I could watch someone's reaction gif loop once, so I knew what they were communicating, and then stop it so I could read the rest of the comments. The only option to replace it is a gif blocker, which is either on or off for the whole browser (not per tab like the old one) and you have to reload the page to get rid of the gifs after turning it on, and you have to right-click each gif individually if you want to unblock them. Ugh. [Edit: the placeholder image for any gif is the full width of the browser page and as high as it is wide. Yes, even if the gif it's replacing is a non-animated 16x16-pixel forum smiley. I think I have to learn to make browser extensions myself from scratch, using my very limited knowledge of BASIC from 1989.]

The other most crucial thing broken is Clearly, which I used to reload stupid pages in a readable format. It let me pick a nice muted background colour and big sans-serif text for comfortable reading, and got rid of all sidebar rubbish. It also often managed to get around websites with stupid lightboxes asking for your email address or telling you not to read any more of their articles this month. I have installed an extension called Reader which appears to do a similar thing. But despite its vaunted selection of 16 million colours, it doesn't appear to offer any way of opening up options to change the colours away from the default stark black-on-white...

I started playing the guitar again a while ago, but then I had a hectic week and then was away from home for a few days, and now all that pain and effort is flaking off the ends of my fingers as the unused calluses begin to wear away. Should only take a few days of battering them about before they get the message to start growing thicker skin again.

It has been twenty years since I was learning those Chuck Berry riffs and finding my way around the frets and I'm amazed that some of it is still in the back of my brain, ready to use again.

Massive numbers of people have voted in advance this election. Lots of reminders for people to vote NOW over the last fortnight. That includes my brother, who is travelling outside his electorate today. I am vanishingly unlikely to forget to vote and I like the atmosphere of election day. I like walking to the local school and seeing people coming in and out of the polling booth; it's one occasion to walk around my area and feel involved in things.

And I like making my mark with the orange pen and getting my sticker. The first time I voted in a national election I accidentally got some orange ink on my finger in the booth, and since then I've made sure to come away with a bit of orange on me so I really feel like I've done my bit.

Beautiful sunny spring day today, that's good for turnout, and it sounds like the youth vote is up a bit, so there's some hope for progress. We'll see.

In the wake of the Great Photobucket Apocalypse of 2017, and after every other image host on the planet has already forbidden image hosting, I'm going to try out Dreamwidth's new image hosting. Here is a picture of a dragon I drew for my niece.
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I currently have no job. Since being too busy at work and being drained after work has ruined my chances of doing NaArMaMo most recent years, perhaps I will do better at making art for a month this time around. On the other hand, it turns out that all my self-worth is in being able to work and so I have been mainly feeling miserable instead of doing amazing things with my new free time.

The Starsky & Hutch episode where Starksy gets shot in an Italian restaurant was most satisfying. I had been hoping for further hurt/comfort episodes, and wanting to see Starksy on the hurting end, and this was perfect. Starsky didn't get much to do in it except lie around and moan, but Hutch touched him and patted him and talked soothingly and worried about him all the way through, it was lovely. And the whole thing happened because they were so keen to go out to dinner together.
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I cannot believe that Hutch went to a wedding rehearsal and brought Starsky with him (that's not the unbelievable bit, why would he go anywhere without him), and then introduced him to the Catholic priest as "my partner" and the priest asked for clarification. It's like something off BBC Sherlock, only at the time it would have been unthinkable to have the main characters of a major TV show be outright gay, so I find it fun queerbaiting rather than infuriating.
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The new Wonder Woman movie gave me a lot more than I'd expected was possible - a superhero movie with a woman as the main character, getting most of the screentime and adventures, being a hero - and its downfall was that it showed me I could hope for something WAY BEYOND that. The first half-hour was ALL about women talking to other women and doing amazing superhero moves and having a history and family and friends and working together and riding neat horses, and it was everything I ever wanted; then men turned up and Diana went away from the beautiful sunny islands and spent the rest of the movie surrounded by muddy trenches and rubble and men. I spent the whole movie expecting all the other Amazons to come back into it and they didn't.

Also Steve Trevor spent a LOT of time telling Diana to stop talking and stop doing things because he knew best. The situation of her having no knowledge of the world outside her island could have been handled in a less un-fun way, I think. I can see they were aiming to have it lead up to a Big Scene where she stops listening to him and goes off to do some heroing with dramatic music, but, you know, she's a hero, we know she's gonna hero, it's impressive without having to watch her be squashed down by a man shutting her up over and over for AN HOUR before she gets to do the heroing.

My partner thought there was excessive use of slow motion during the fight scenes. I loved every second of it because I wanted to see a woman being a superhero on the big screen and I wanted to be able to see it happen. Last couple of Marvel superhero movies I've seen, the camera is jiggling around all the time the fight's going on so there's no way to know who's hitting who and it makes me feel a bit seasick so I just look to see who's standing up once the fight scene's over. It's all right with me if the camera lingers for a while on Wonder Woman leaping through the air and looking amazing.

There are no scenes of Wonder Woman being raped or threatened with rape. I thought I'd say because that's something I wanted to know before I went to see it.